ABSTRACT
For over thirty years, organizations and individuals in the feminist movement in the United States have sought to influence government. By the 1990s, the movement activists had formed a number of strong, professional organizations with close ties to each other and to feminists inside the legislature and government agencies (Costain 1992; Spalter-Roth and Schreiber 1995). What has been the impact of this women's policy network on politics and policymaking? There are various ways to try to assess the impact of social movements on government (Gamson 1975). One is to look at the content of laws passed. Another is to see if government leaders recognize and receive movement leaders as legitimate representatives of a constituency, a procedural response. This chapter focuses on a third type of response that is an important link between movement actors' demands on the one hand and policy content and procedural responses on the other: substantive representation of movement demands in the policymaking process. Substantive representation is the inclusion of a group's policy preferences and issues in the agenda of government (Pitkin 1967). For the feminist movement, such representation involves more than just putting their issues on the agenda; it means the inclusion of their gender ideas in the framework of the debates on these issues.
